No. iPhones. in. Canada.

Dear fellow Vancouverites & West Coasters,

Does anyone else think that this weather we’ve been having is really weird??

It’s and sunny at the same time with misty rainbows in the sky…. or it’s rainy and windy and cold… or it’s rainy and really muggy and sticky…or it’s raining so much it actually hurts… ouch!!! or it’s rainy all day and then at exactly 6:30pm the sun comes out for a few hours…

That’s weird right?

(Photo of seagull taken on Kits beach near Point Grey during a dark and stormy sunset with Rebel Xti)

PS. It’s supposed to be summer.

Before Wordpress… there was Blogger. Blogger was my first blog host. i had some good times with Blogger, but after 2 months we were fighting every day. i felt like i couldn’t “be myself” within the Blogger platform. Yes, it got kind of ugly and i said some nasty things. Not proud of it… ashamed really. I left Blogger without a single glance back. For the last 5 months, i have pretended that my Blogger blog never existed, tossing it out on the www with no hope of aligned text or good links or any semblance of ok html.

that is until today. today i was like,

“i hate this stupid free wordpress.com crap. i can’t embed my revver flash videos, i can’t add cool javascript widgets from widgetbox.com, i can’t add sweet gallary plug-ins, i’m marked as Spam…SPAM on Russian blogs like Arry’s, and i know Slaff hates free wordpressers. this sucks! i suck. why can’t i figure this php, mysql stuff out. why???”

and then i cried. not really. but i wanted to. instead i ate more cookies and lamented over the fact that even if i had a million dollars, i couldn’t buy the iPhone or buy the complete second season of Battlestar Galactica on the iTunes store. seriously Steve, that sucks!!

So… i went and took a look at my old Blogger Blog’s html stuff and found i could code a nice and simple template quite well. i also felt that Blogger had be doing a lot of “self-improvement” and deserved some props for adding a lot of functionality. i was able to put my embedded flash movies up and add a revver widget and some other ad-like java things in the sidebar licketty-split… which made me think,

blogger, you can look quite snazzy, can’t you… quite snazzy indeed! even the header graphic looks better. grrr… it DOES look better. erg! damn you blogger, you’re making my wordpress blog look bad!

i’ll admit it. i feel a wee bit drawn into the javascript friendliness of Blogger… but, alas, i am knee deep in CSS and i know when i upgrade to Wordpress 2.2 it will be magical… won’t it???

I dunno. I suspect that spiders are out and about all the time. But I’m not a spider-specialist as such, so I’ll consult the internet-powers-that-be to find out! Apparently, there are nocturnal spiders… uhh gross… spider pictures are yucky. Sorry you’re on your own for this one. Ick.

hmmm… tricky. Let me check Wikipedia…

“Toad” refers to a number of species of amphibians. A distinction is often made between frogs and toads by their appearance….

Well, that doesn’t help out much. Let’s do a narrower Google search… Here we go! According to NatureHaven.com

Toads are mostly nocturnal, resting during the day in burrows, in trees, or under leaves.

Aha! Toads do come out at night! Although, Mr. Toad of The Wind and the Willows fame, also goes out during the day. But Mr. Toad is no ordinary toad!

Mr. Toad is very rich and thus able to indulge his impulsive desires, such as punting, house boating and hot air balloons, and his penchant for Harris tweed suits. He is, however, conceited, self-centered and lacking in basic common sense. His reckless interest in motor cars led to an episode in which he stole a motor car and subsequently crashed it. The result was brief spell in prison, from which he was to escape, dressed as a washer woman, to regain his family seat of Toad Hall from the clutches of the weasels.

Washer woman hahaha! I loved that cartoon. Ah the knowledge network, I remember thee fondly.

One last question… I’m starting to lose it here.

Well, nocturnal ones… obviously! There are many nocturnal animals (I am one of them…) and you can find a list at this wonderful site EnchantedLearning.com. The graphics on this site are so bad, they are almost cool (see below).

And as a *bonus* you can get sweet animal picture printouts that you can colour with pencil crayons or like, sniffy markers!!! Awesome. I’m gonna do that right now.

Y mis amigos españoles… ¿Tiene algunas preguntas?

Check out Redpilot on Virb to see more videos.

Click the above Flickr photo mosaic to view my favourite photographs taken this year.

I finally finished sorting through all my photos (1300+) and organizing them… mostly. I have so many iPhoto libraries spread out over 6 external HDs, a dozen back-up DVDs, my old G4 ibook, a powerbook G4, and now my current Macbook! I want to combine multiple iPhoto libraries (from all of these sources) into one Master iPhoto library that will live on a external HD I have connected to my wireless network via Airport Extreme.

I need help! Мне нужна помощь! Does anyone know an easy, effective way to create a Master iPhoto library without making a big mess (duplicate files, lost files, information, etc)? Есть ли среди моих очень умных русских друзей знает?

because the possibility that you are right is slim to none.

In the field of linguistics, Chomsky is King. And we few, but loyal linguists quietly sit in our ivory tower protected by the omnipotent grace of our king, and observe the kingdom of language. We listen and ponder and discuss, and present and applaud.

Jolly good presentation Arthur! I always wondered if full closure occurred at the ariepiglottic location in epiglottal stops. It makes good sense though. Right, well I’m off to the Antarctic again to see whether those darn penguins have figured it out yet.

But once in a blue moon, a wandering linguist in the wild jungles of somewhere hard to pronounce, observes a language that doesn’t quite fit into Chomsky’s “universal” theory. And then that linguist presents the contrary findings to other linguists and they talk and soon the twittering of a paradigm shift echoes in the ivory tower:

I never believed in syntax anyway. Something off-putting about those trees. So many branches. Ugh. And I could never find a piece of paper big enough to fit all that…
Yeah, all those trees! Syntax just isn’t, like, sustainable…
Totally. Go Green!!!
Yeah. I’m not using paper ever!
No way!
Yeah.. and, like, didn’t you think it was kind of weird that he was so furry…
Who?
Chompsky.
What are you talking about?
I mean how can you trust a monkey anyway…
What?
Chompsky is a monkey. Don’t get me wrong, he was really smart monkey. They say he learnt language and then piloted a rocket into space…
Are you talking about Nim Chimpsky, the chimpanzee at Columbia University who the subject of and animal language acquisition project?
Ooh chimpanzee that monkey news.

(In order to get this joke you need to know about the following:

1. Sentences can be drawn into tree-like structures.
2. Paper is made out of trees (real ones).
3. Syntactic trees can get very long, thus wasting a lot of paper made from trees.
4. Sustainability is a hot topic in the world.
5. The truth is inconvenient cuz people don’t like to think that a giant tsunami is gonna destroy North America and the only person that can save us is Dennis Quaid.
6. Dennis plays the role of a climatologist who tries to save the world from rapid global warming in the movie The Day After Tomorrow.
7. He is not very convincing in this role.
8. First year linguistic students often mispronounce Chomsky as “Chompsky”.
9. Really dumb first year students often confuse the Columbia University chimpanzee, Nim Chimpsky, with linguist, philosopher, political activist, Noam Chomsky.
10. The Ricky Gervais podcast featuring Steve Merchant and Karl Pilkington has a segment called “monkey news” were Karl talks about news concerning monkeys, like a monkey that according to Karl, piloted a rocket into outer space.
11. While introducing this segment, Ricky Gervais says, “Oooh chimpanzee that monkey news”.

What’s the point of this???

Oh yeah, there’s a big brouhaha in the linguistic community over the research of Dan Everett, an American linguistics professor and feather-ruffler-at-large, that claims that Pirahã, a language spoken by a small tribe in the Amazon, challenges Noam Chomsky’s theory of “Universal Grammar”.

If you are so inclined, you can read the scintillating New Yorker article:
The Interpreter
Has a remote Amazonian tribe upended our understanding of language?
by John Colapinto

What do you think about all this? Should we shout “paradigm shift!” OR bury our heads in the sand for a few more years??

I personally blame Slaff.

¡Ahora tengo aún más distracciones de mi trabajo!

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